E3 Shows More Mature Virtual Reality, But it Still Has Room to Grow

At this year's E3, virtual reality wasn't cloistered away into secret meeting rooms. For the first time in the trade show's history, VR hardware and software sat on the show floor, in an area reserved for giant first-party publishers like Sony and Nintendo.

Both the Oculus Rift and Sony's Project Morpheus were playable by anyone with an E3 badge, and there were long lines for both virtual reality headsets. But both these headsets' creators will quickly point out they are only prototypes, and not ready for prime-time.

The biggest paradox of E3 was that these virtual reality experiences are getting close to completion, and yet neither Oculus VR or Sony has said a peep as to when they could possibly be commercially available. But maybe from the tea leaves of E3 we can potentially glean when virtual reality might be available, and how close we are to it.

Image: Three One Zero/505 Games

A wider variety of VR experiences

At last year's E3, one of the breakout games of the show was EVE Valkyrie, a space fighting game that put you in the cockpit of a jet in zero gravity. It and a small number of games were the few available to play, but marked the platform's meager progress.

But in 2014, there were a wide variety of games by several prominent publishers all attempting the first wobbly steps into a brave new gaming world. Some highlighted what we know the platform can already excel at: the deep, immersive experience. In Adr1ft, created by ex-Xbox exec Adam Orth and published by 505 Games, you play an astronaut who floats free of your spacecraft after it explodes in Earth's orbit. The isolating, almost peaceful demo left you floating above a blue Earth, only accompanied by quiet piano music and a sense of confusion as to how you arrived there.

There were also the jump-out-of-your-skin horror games that found virtual reality to be the perfect medium to experience an early heart attack. Sega announced during E3 it was bringing upcoming survival horror title Alien: Isolation to virtual reality. The short tech-demo was just as nerve-wracking as you'd imagine, as you skulk around a deserted ship avoiding an alien that will take you down as soon as it spots you.

But there were also virtual reality experiences that offered real surprises. Lucky's Tale, a third-person platformer, wouldn't seem like an easy fit for virtual reality, but the game captured a sense of wonder as you guided a cherubic cartoon fox through a prismatic world. The game was developed by Paul Bettner and his team at Playful, who formerly worked on Words with Friends, who said a simple prototype showed him how cool a platformer on virtual reality could be.

"I just looked up at the whole level stretching out ahead of me. That's not something I'd done in a platformer before. Normally you have to control the camera, but here you can just look around and see everything in level at any time," Bettner said.

Image: Playful

Lucky's Tale looked most polished of the VR games available at E3, showing a whole playable level. It's no surprise; the game is being produced by Oculus VR.

But many of the games are still relegated to tech-demo status at E3. While the show is known for giving vertical slices — small bits of games representative of one portion of the gameplay — many VR playables there didn't actually represent any games in development, as far as we know. The biggest culprit of this was Sony, which showed three demos at E3: a underwater shark encounter and a medieval combat simulator that were updated versions of those shown at GDC, and a street luge demo. The street luge was by far the most impressive, as it simply relied on gentle tilts of the head to steer. But each of these lasted under three minutes. To be fair, Project Morpheus has only been available to developers since the end of March.

Where is the hardware?

Since we are definitely looking at prototype versions of both headsets, how far are the real things along in development? The Oculus Rift is already receiving a second update for developers, known in the industry as DK2. That will start shipping to developers who preordered in July, and it supports a higher resolution screen and solves many of the previous versions' latency issues.

But the Oculus VR team has confirmed it is already testing what is being referred to as a "consumer prototype" internally. This prototype is not going to see the light of day anytime soon, said VP of Product Nate Mitchell, but the fact it exists could mean an consumer Oculus Rift is closer than we think.

Morpheus isn't near its final stages yet either, but many of the features seem somewhat final. The lights on the sides, which at first blush seem like sci-fi window dressings, allow the headset to be detected by the PlayStation Move camera. The headset feels more solid and comfortable than the Rift, ditching the elastic straps for easier-to-adjust plastic. Dr. Richard Marks, the head of Sony's Research and Development lab that came up with Morpheus, said the team had already made some small tweaks, like moving the headset's audio jack to a better position out of the way.

It's not clear which headset is farther along, since they have both come at some of the same problems from different angles. What is surprising and encouraging is how quickly the technology from both has shifted from the three months since their last public showing at the Game Developer's Conference.

The state of VR peripherals

Once virtual reality becomes a consumer reality, there will be a huge cottage industry of peripherals to work with the headsets and provide more immersive experiences. Many of those will be in the form of controllers; while Sony's Morpheus will work with PlayStation 4 accessories, there is a lot of room to run for the open Oculus ecosystem.

One of those peripherals is the Virtuix Omni treadmill, which allows players to move in any direction while playing a virtual reality game. The treadmill is also still in its prototype phases, though it was fully playable with two demos on the E3 show floor.

Virtuix CEO Jan Goetgeluk said the full version of the Omni would be rolling out to those who pre-ordered it in a few months. While the $499 price tag might limit the initial appeal to virtual reality enthusiasts, including some who pre-ordered the Oculus dev kits, it still could be an indicator of when we might see a new headset.

It takes as long as it takes

While many of virtual reality's biggest supporters are hoping for the technology to get into our hands sooner rather than later, this long development period is inevitably good for the platform. Along with just building anticipation, getting public input allows Oculus VR and Sony to get a lot of developers and content creators involved now, so there will be plenty of games and other experiences already working by the time consumers hook up their headsets. And of course, both companies want to avoid the pitfalls of just becoming another fad technology, like VR was in the 90s.

"There's one good thing about this delay: Oculus has had a zillion opportunities to take shortcuts, and they haven't," Bettner said. "When DK1 first came out, and everyone loved it, they could have just said, 'Great! Why don't we just put this on sale and make as much money off it as possible?' But they knew they didn't have a product they believed in yet." A lot of other companies would have taken those shortcuts based on their rising popularity.

"What I think everyone wants is to have that experience where you go to Toys R' Us and you just buy one thing and put it on and there is no complications, no wires, just an all-in-one experience."

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